One of the things we all need to do is to be able in some way to quantify how bad this pain is. The very common thing we're using now is the zero to ten. If you say to someone, zero is no pain at all, ten is the worst pain you can possibly imagine, where in that scale is your pain? It is what's real to the patient. That is what is important. Patients are to be believed. As I tried to describe mine, most of the time it wasn't excruciating. It probably fell in that three to four range for me most of the time. If, for me, my pain is four now and I get on a regime of medication that lowers it to a one or a two, which is what happened for me, that's wonderful. If I relieved all the pain the side effects were more than I wanted. My mouth was too dry. I chose to back off and settle for a 75 milligram dose, which controlled the pain adequately and didn't give me too many side effects and that worked very well.

Additional Medical Information:

• Rating Pain